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Hockey Gold!!

I bet you’re wondering why I’m posting something completely unrelated to archaeology. Strangely enough, it is related to archaeology. Team Canada’s early morning victory in Men’s Hockey actually brought back a very vague recollection from my early dig seasons at Dangeil.

In the early days, the excavation team was pretty much half Canadian, half Sudanese. Those were also the days when we didn’t have electricity (not even a generator) and we had to go fetch our water from the artesian well. Cell phones didn’t work well and we rarely got news from home. Somehow we had found that Team Canada had won Olympic gold by beating Team USA (this has to be our 2002 season). Julie and I were ecstatic, but everybody else thought we were nuts. (We had to explain to our Sudanese colleagues what ice hockey was… they thought we were even more nuts, but were happy we had beat the US.) I’m pretty sure it was the Olympics because Julie and I don’t cheer for same NHL team: she roots for the Toronto Maple Leafs and I am fan of the Montreal Canadiens. (Go Habs, go!) We couldn’t have been both cheering if it had been a regular NHL game!

In any case, the point of this blog post is that even when we’re on the dig we still cheer for our favourite sports teams. This has been made easier over the years now that we have better (but still not great) cell reception, internet connection, electricity and, in general, better living conditions. We dig more often than not during the fall, so we don’t have Olympic victories to celebrate anymore. Julie and I will watch out for the score of Habs vs Leafs games. And we have British colleagues on the dig, too. Our Sudanese and British colleagues who love soccer follow the Africa Cup games as well as UK games. When our team wins, you bet the rest of the dig team finds out!

Julie’s actually on the dig right now. I’ll e-mail her to let her know that not only we beat the US a few days ago, we won gold against Sweden this morning.
Go Team Canada!